(credit: SpaceX) SpaceX appears to be betting big on carbon fiber composites, which could increase the capacity of its future rockets to get people and supplies into space—and eventually to the surface of Mars. According to a report in Nikkei Asian Review , SpaceX has signed an agreement with Toray Carbon Fibers estimated to be worth $2 billion to $3 billion. The total price and delivery dates have yet to be finalized. It is not immediately clear exactly when, and in which launch vehicles, these lightweight composites will be employed by SpaceX. But the company is not alone in its interest—NASA and other aerospace companies have been experimenting with the materials because they have the potential to increase the amount of payload that can be carried by a rocket. They could also lower overall manufacturing cost. The scale of the deal seems telling, however. If the value of the deal as reported is correct, in the billions of dollars, it seems probable that the carbon fiber composites would be used in SpaceX’s proposed Mars Colonial Transporter rocket. This is the very large (but still under development) rocket the company plans to use to transport humans to Mars. SpaceX is already far along in the production of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which is based on the Falcon 9 core stage. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, which SpaceX has successfully been landing this year, has tank walls and domes built from an aluminum lithium alloy. (Ars has reached out to SpaceX for comment on this story and will update accordingly). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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He must be serious about Mars: Elon Musk invests $2 billion in carbon fibers
“A pair of security researchers recently uncovered a Nigerian scammer ring that they say operates a new kind of attack…after a few of its members accidentally infected themselves with their own malware, ” reports IEEE Spectrum. “Over the past several months, they’ve watched from a virtual front row seat as members used this technique to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from small and medium-sized businesses worldwide.” Wave723 writes: Nigerian scammers are becoming more sophisticated, moving on from former ‘spoofing’ attacks in which they impersonated a CEO’s email from an external account. Now, they’ve begun to infiltrate employee email accounts to monitor financial transactions and slip in their own routing and account info…The researchers estimate this particular ring of criminals earns about US $3 million from the scheme. After they infected their own system, the scammers’ malware uploaded screenshots and all of their keystrokes to an open web database, including their training sessions for future scammers and the re-routing of a $400, 000 payment. Yet the scammers actually “appear to be ‘family men’ in their late 20s to 40s who are well-respected, church-going figures in their communities, ” according to the article. SecureWorks malware researcher Joe Stewart says the scammers are “increasing the economic potential of the region they’re living in by doing this, and I think they feel somewhat of a duty to do this.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Ransomware is “generating huge profits, ” says Cisco. Slashdot reader coondoggie shares this report from Network World: Enterprise-targeting cyber enemies are deploying vast amounts of potent ransomware to generate revenue and huge profits — nearly $34 million annually, according to Cisco’s Mid-Year Cybersecurity Report out this week. Ransomware, Cisco wrote, has become a particularly effective moneymaker, and enterprise users appear to be the preferred target. Many of the victims were slow to patch their systems, according to the article. One study of Cisco devices running on fundamental infrastructure discovered that 23% had vulnerabilities dating back to 2011, and 16% even had vulnerabilities dating back to 2009. Popular attack vectors included vulnerabilities in JBoss and Adobe Flash, which was responsible for 80% of the successful attacks for one exploit kit. The article also reports that attackers are now hiding their activities better using HTTPS and TLS, with some even using a variant of Tor. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 